Didn't see a thread for this week's SmackDown Live!, so I thought I'd start one. In this episode:

-The Miz destroyed John Cena on the mic. Just flat out crushed him in an genuinely wonderful, perfectly executed promo that got a "YOU SOLD OUT!" chant started against Cena that was "real" while never veering off the path of being something a cowardly heel would say. Straight fire from The Miz. Cena responded by using his "I'm John Cena And I Get To Go Last So You Can't Refute My Points" special ability to say that Miz sucks and his whole persona is fake and stolen while saying it in his fake, stolen rapper/Senator Foghorn Leghorn voice, and also claiming "I have no booking power or I'd be wrestling Undertaker, not you!" before bringing out his girlfriend to chase Miz out of the ring.

Look, I actually missed the beginning of this and still don't know what the motivation was here to kick this turn off, but when I switched back to the show, Randy Orton: Avatar of The World Snake, was in World Heavyweight Champion Bray Wyatt's Secret Devil House and this wasn't just regular Randy Orton, this was NIGHT FORCE(™) Randy Orton, clad in his all-black Stealth Suit, and he was dumping an insane (and frankly, superfluous) amount of gasoline all over Bray's Devil House live via video while Bray Wyatt, in the ring, was literally on his hands and knees crying and begging Snake Man not to burn down the Devil House where Bray's sister's corpse lives, but Snake Man didn't care and he set Bray's Devil House on fire and it burned to the ground while Randy did the Randy Orton Pose in front of the burning Devil House and this is the best angle ever.

Orton/Bray blew my mind last night. This is what Buddy Rogers vs Bruno Sammartino was all building to over 50 years ago. We're at the culmination of the WWE Championship and it will never get any better than this.

I guess my only criticism is that, yeah, it kind of all came out of nowhere. I don't remember hearing anything about Randy in the Wyatt's Florida Swamp Compound on a special mission or anything like that early enough to really set this up.

The plotting for SmackDown seems arbitrary. "Last week of February. Sounds good to me!" Sure.

Bray giving Orton "the keys to the castle" was literally him giving Randy keys to his Wyatt Compound's sister corpse shed?

George Michael weighed his options. Maeby had chastised him for not taking risks, and what would be a bigger risk than perpetuating a lie about software just to ignite the passions of a woman? Of course it would be a lie, and since Maeby wouldn't know it was a lie, he wouldn't appear to be taking a risk. Perhaps the bigger risk was to tell his father he was lying, that he came up with it because he wanted his father to leave so he could enjoy what remained of his senior year. After all, he wondered, wouldn't that be the course of action taken by an overtly sexual man, a man who owns a pair of matador pants? He had not responded now for 41 seconds according to his unfailing internal clock, and it was time to come clean.

The Wyatt saga was a really good storyline that got spun on it's head and turned into WrestleCrap over night. They had a lot of ways they could have gone, so this was a disappointment. I might be in the monority here, I don't know, maybe it will rebound and we can forget about this moment. Or maybe it's cool with kids, so good for them.

So, as far as I can tell, here is the plan that Randy Orton concocted:

Join the Wyatt Family in the least convincing way possible. Pretend to be a loyal member for a few months. Win the tag team titles. Lose the tag team titles. Somehow win the Royal Rumble, then do nothing to help Bray Wyatt win the World Title, so by absolute happenstance, you’re booked to wrestle Bray Wyatt at WrestleMania. Then refuse that match, causing chaos with the WrestleMania card. Then dig up Sister Abigail’s grave and burn Bray Wyatt’s house. That’s the best Randy Orton can do, folks.

Kevin Kelly: "Mr. Austin, would you like to comment on Wade Keller's Take that endorsing the XFL hurts your anti-authority character?"

Steve Austin: "Oh shit, he actually said that? I thought the boys in the back were ribbing me!"

Kelly: "No, he really said that. Did they tell you the part about you sitting in the stands, looking all skeptical?"

Okay, how they got to this point might be convoluted to say the least but I still found Orton/Brawy to be a really entertaining segment and anything that makes Orton more interesting than he has been is a good direction.

The negative here is what happens with Styles now. My guess is Orton gets his #1 contender back and they take it from AJ. Which is a good way of explaining his feud with Shane, BUT taking a title shot from someone who won it fair and square SHOULD make Shane the heel, not AJ, but my guess is that's not what they want us to think.

Mickie/Becky was disappointing. Three falls in a match that only lasts 6 minutes is pretty useless. I believe last time they did a 2 out of 3 (Cesaro vs. Ziggler I want to say?) it was similarly too short to justify 3 pinfalls.

Originally posted by DirtyMikeSeaverI think the Uproxx Smackdown reviewer said it best:

So, as far as I can tell, here is the plan that Randy Orton concocted:

Join the Wyatt Family in the least convincing way possible. Pretend to be a loyal member for a few months. Win the tag team titles. Lose the tag team titles. Somehow win the Royal Rumble, then do nothing to help Bray Wyatt win the World Title, so by absolute happenstance, you’re booked to wrestle Bray Wyatt at WrestleMania. Then refuse that match, causing chaos with the WrestleMania card. Then dig up Sister Abigail’s grave and burn Bray Wyatt’s house. That’s the best Randy Orton can do, folks.

The least they could have done was rip off the Sting/Flair angle in 1990, where Sting was a Horseman and had a title shot and they all encouraged him not to take it. Then, when Sting chose to go for it, they all kicked his ass and Sting came back for revenge.

I know WWE has this thing about booking weak babyfaces, but this angle was clearly set up for this sort of thing, or a DiBiase/Virgil type deal where Wyatt asks Orton to decline and Orton waffles him with the belt.

Just realize that every good wrestling storyline has ever been written and pull from that well.

I've seen some of the same issues brought up in multiple places, so please allow me to shed* some light on the finer points of SNAKE MAN VS. SATAN: The Angle.

First, Randy Orton is not a good guy. Randy Orton is beyond morality as any of us see it. Remember that, in kayfabe, Orton was legitimately diagnosed on-air with an actual, DSM5-classified behavioral disorder, Intermittent Explosive Disorder.

But remember that he also hears voices in his head, they council him, they understand. THEY TALK TO HIM. Us? We got our rules and our religion, all designed to keep us safe. But when rules start getting broken, we start questionin' our faith. Orton, on the other hand, has a voice that is his savior, it hates to love and loves to hate. He has a voice that has the knowledge and the power to rule our fate.

The rest of us might turn to lawyers (defenseless!) or doctors (diseased!), preachers (sinners!) or police, who just take the grease. Judges? They are guilty. Bosses? They will be fired. Bankers will have losses. Politicians? ALL ARE LIARS.

Imagine seeing that darkness falling. Imagine...imagine hearing those voices calling. Would you not feel justice crawling? Would you not see faith has fallen?

Now, as I've argued in the past, the jury is still out as to whether the voices that Randy hears in his head are real (and belong to The World Snake, the elder god that wraps around the world and forms what we consider the equator: notably, that which brings equality) or if he just has a massive, undiagnosed brain tumor that is driving him batshit insane. But the point remains, Orton is explicitly driven to serve his own brand of ice cold justice. He is the Apex Predator, the one above all others in the WWE Universe, the one for whom all WWE Superstars are potential prey. Orton is the balance that keeps everyone and everything in check. He's not a good guy. He's not a bad guy. He's SNAKE MAN.

Conversely, Bray Wyatt is unquestionably not a good guy. I've seen people do the "Oh, actually Rusev is good" thing a lot. Rusev is awesome, but he's not good. He's a jingoistic xenophobe who endlessly shit-talks his host country and tried to make everybody watch his wedding video, which, gtfo with that, man.

But multiply that times ten for Bray Wyatt, who is actually legitimately evil. Like, literally satanic evil. He was invoking Beelzebub in the ring right before Orton burned down his Devil House. He's explicitly told us he's the Eater of Worlds and plans to genuinely destroy the world (by wrestling). He brainwashes people like the beloved Daniel Bryan. He kidnaps and steals the powers of Undertaker and Orton as part of his plans to destroy the world (by wrestling). He has an army of evil magic children that he uses to cheat at wrestling matches. He's an actual demon and has told us so in seven minute promos almost every week for like, five years now. He is bad. Very bad. Arguably the most evil wrestler in history.

Now, consider his past actions and how they were met. He kidnapped Kane (a demon HR specialist) and Undertaker (a zombie wizard) and attempted to steal their magical superpowers to destroy the world (by wrestling). He paid for his sins by...I forget, getting tombstoned?

He also attempted to turn John Cena evil by possessing all the children of the world to turn them against Cena, and Cena responded by...pushing a suitcase on top of him.

I gotta say, to me? These seem like fairly light punishments considering the scope of the crimes.

Conversely, in September, Wyatt injured Randy Orton's ankle. In response, Randy Orton proceeded to allow himself to become brainwashed and indoctrinated into Bray Wyatt's Doomsday Cult, served at Wyatt's side in order to become his righthand man and destroy the Wyatt Family within and have Wyatt hand him the "keys to the kingdom" (quite possibly a literal spare set of keys to Wyatt's Devil House) and then burned down Wyatt's Devil House and the corpse of Wyatt's evil sister/power source.

NOW WE'RE TALKING.

Some people think that, perhaps, this was a harsh response, but again, Orton received terrible head trauma in August at the elbows of Brock Lesnar - trauma so bad, you may have forgotten, that a confused, wounded Viper was forced to show up wearing pants! - and was then set upon by the Wyatts shortly after. I did, in fact, predict this very angle the night after Summerslam:

I lost my shit on here years and years ago when Lance Storm debuted on Raw not wearing pants, and so help me, I lost my shit last night when Randy Orton came out in pants, but it a totally different way. When he first came out in actual street clothes, I assumed that the angle was going to be that Brock's assault caused enough trauma to cause amnesia in Randy, and that he no longer knew who he was (The Man Who Never Wears Pants), perhaps leading to an angle where The Snake God who controls the voices in Randy's head finally takes over Randy's body and it turns out that this is the moment Bray Wyatt has been waiting for, The Snake God made flesh here to devour the world.

So you see, the Wyatts saw what they believed to be a weakend Viper and pounced on him (literally, at one point, for that ankle injury angle) and just over a month later, we got this:

Originally posted by by me For those who did not see it, Orton went backstage to confront Wyatt but was magically transported into an evil, Silent Hill-esque version of the backstage area and had to basically play Myst to find Wyatt, all while being stalked by an evil, powered-up looking Rowan. Randy seemingly killed Rowan off-screen and disguised himself to get to Wyatt but...Well, how do we take the end of that segment?

Is Randy Orton now trapped inside Bray's mind? Trapped inside his own mind? Trapped in Hell? WHEN WILL THE SNAKE GOD INTERVENE ON BEHALF OF ITS AVATAR?!

It was right there all along. We saw Orton, on the astral plane, disguise his psyche as a Wyatt member to begin his elaborte revenge plan of destroying Wyatt's Cult and burning down his Devil House and destroying his sister's corpse as payback for messing up Randy's ankle right at the beginning. What the IGN reviewers of the world miss is that Randy winning the Rumble and Bray winning the belt at Elimination Chamber were incidental. Delightful, unexpected bonuses for Randy. He'll gladly take Bray's belt at Wrestlemania now, but that's not why he destroyed everything in the world that Actual Hillbilly Wizard Demon Bray Wyatt loved. He did it because Bray hurt his ankle, and Randy Orton is a compeltely insane Snake Man who serves a god older and more powerful than Wyatt and has developed his own brand of batshit crazy justice because of the World Snake's voice that councils him.

Now, is it a perfect angle? No, of course not. They needed, I think to show us how Orton was able to survive his trip to the astral plane where Bray captured his soul. Ideally, the answer would have been that Daniel Bryan - himself a former Wyatt victim - would have realized that Orton can not simultaneously serve the World Snake and the Eater of Worlds, and he would have devised a plan to send Kane - another former Wyatt victim and Bryan's old friend - to personally seek out the World Snake and offer himself up as the new Avatar of The World Snake, becoming SNAKE KANE (possibly SKANE, possibly KAA-NE, either way, maskless Kane but with scales for skin) and we would have had SNAKE KANE vs. DARK RANDY at Elimination Chamber, where Orton would have won, but would have had his loyalty to the World Snake restored, secretly freeing him from Wyatt's control.

But still, aside from that shortcut, this angle makes perfect sense. An Evil Appalachian Demon Wizard kicked an insane, amoral Snake Man in the ankle, and the Snake Man got mad and burned down his house and the dead bodies of his relatives he uses to generate his dark magic powers in retaliation.

Originally posted by Dr Unlikely-The Miz destroyed John Cena on the mic. Just flat out crushed him in an genuinely wonderful, perfectly executed promo that got a "YOU SOLD OUT!" chant started against Cena that was "real" while never veering off the path of being something a cowardly heel would say. Straight fire from The Miz. Cena responded by using his "I'm John Cena And I Get To Go Last So You Can't Refute My Points" special ability to say that Miz sucks and his whole persona is fake and stolen while saying it in his fake, stolen rapper/Senator Foghorn Leghorn voice, and also claiming "I have no booking power or I'd be wrestling Undertaker, not you!" before bringing out his girlfriend to chase Miz out of the ring.

THIS! Cena undid pretty much all the goodwill he's been trying to earn the last few years by having good matches with/give the rub to some of the younger guys (and AJ Styles) with this promo. Instead of treating the Miz's intensity with the respect it deserved, he made goofy faces the whole time to signal to his fans and the rest of the crowd that Miz isn't to be taken seriously at all. I know it won't/can't happen but would love for the Miz & Maryse to KILL the Total Divas team at WrestleMania. I think that's going to be the bathroom break match for me as a result.

"You are going to get a certain amount of snarkiness on the Internet no matter what, and my rule is that you don't post anything that you wouldn't say to someone's face." Marc Andreyko (Writer of DC Comic's "Manhunter")

Okay, that is seriously the best post to ever hit The W. I might be back on board with Wyatt - Orton after reading that.

I just wanted to point out that it shouldn't surprise anyone that Randy Orton burned Wyatt's house down while wearing pants. Even an insane snake man knows the dangers of picking up a tick in all that tall grass.